"Big new infrastructure costing billions is not the best way to accelerate decarbonization"
Credit: BlackRockSolar/flickr
Small-scale clean energy and low carbon technologies—such as solar
panels, smart appliances and electric bicycles—are more likely to push
society toward meeting climate goals than large-scale technologies,
according to a new study from a team of international researchers.
The findings, published today in Science,
suggest governments and investors around the world should prioritize
small-scale, low carbon technologies in policy design and research
development in order to reduce emissions responsible for climate change
in a more efficient and just way.
The study authors make their case for small-scale climate change solutions.
For years, scientists have issued stark warnings that, without drastic
cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, we will further warm the planet and
increasingly experience "substantial" consequences—wildfires,
droughts, flooding, coral reef die-offs, food shortages.
A
groundbreaking 2018 study from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change found that the planet is on a trajectory to warm by as much as
2.7-degrees Fahrenheit (compared to pre-industrial temperatures) by
2040.
The message from climate scientists has been clear and consistent—we have to act fast.
In the new study, researchers examined how to best attack the problem
with available technologies.
They collected information on a wide
assortment of energy technologies and examined their viability to help
push countries toward meeting international climate change goals,
defined in the study as needing to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half
within the next decade and to net-zero by 2050.
They tested how well each technology performed in cost, innovation,
accessibility, social return, equality of access, investment risk and
other characteristics.
The team divided technologies into two categories: "lumpy" technologies
such as nuclear power, carbon capture, high speed transit, whole
building retrofits; and "granular" technologies such as solar panels,
electricity storage batteries, heat pumps, smart thermostats, electric
bikes, and shared taxis.
They found the granular options "can help drive faster and fairer
progress towards climate targets," said lead author Charlie Wilson, a
researcher at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the
University of East Anglia, in a statement.
"Big new infrastructure costing billions is not the best way to
accelerate decarbonization," Wilson said. "Governments, firms,
investors, and citizens should instead prioritize smaller-scale
solutions, which deploy faster. This means directing funding, policies,
incentives, and opportunities for experimentation away from the few big
and towards the many small."
Wilson and colleagues wrote the granular tech was "associated with
faster diffusion, lower investment risk, faster learning, more
opportunities to escape lock-in, more equitable access, more job
creation, and higher social returns on innovation investment."
They cautioned that small-scale technology is not always the answer—for
example, there are no alternatives for planes or industrial plants.
"Smaller scale innovations are not a panacea," said co-author Nuno
Bento, a researcher at the University Institute of Lisbon, in a
statement.
However, these smaller technologies are, in general, quicker to get to
market and less complex. This accessibility means more jobs—which makes
them an easier sell for policymakers crafting climate change plans.
"Large 'silver bullet' technologies like nuclear power or carbon
capture storage are politically seductive," said co-author Arnulf
Brubler, a researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems
Analysis, in a statement.
"But larger scale technologies and infrastructures absorb large shares
of available public resources without delivering the rapid
decarbonization we need."
David Farrier’s idea in this book is to try and imagine our present moment of
climate and ecological crisis from a far-distant future. What fossil
traces will post-industrial human civilisation leave behind for the
future to find? Roads and vast cities, long abandoned and forgotten,
will show up as layers in the geological strata; our buried radioactive
waste will still be deadly; our throwaway plastic will persist until
eventually “over the coming millennia, hydrocarbons leach from the
fossil plastic, accumulating in small deposits and setting in motion a
slow chemical return” to its origins as oil.
Future archaeologists may
comment on the dreary sameness of our collective biomass: almost all of
it Homo sapiens, along with the few species we like to eat.
Which future archaeologists would those be, by the way? Sometimes
Farrier is addressing human generations to come; at other times he’s
thinking on timescales longer than any species is likely to last, let
alone ours with its over-sophistication and bad habits.
One
microbiologist fantasises that some day a “commune of evolved bees” will
encourage bee-scientists to study the Anthropocene as “a warning for all hive-kind”.The transience of what appears indestructible has been a rich theme
in poetry and story. The mists shift on a bleak hillside in Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, where bloody Cobweb Castle is visible, now vanished and forgotten; Saxons write poems
about stumbling on the ruins of Roman Aquae Sulis; Batman chases
villains round the fallen grandeur of Gotham City.
Farrier’s argument is
nuanced slightly differently, channelling our contemporary angst. It’s
not only that our way of life is transient. Our heedless interventions
in the life of the planet – herding, ploughing, planting, building,
mining, smelting, processing, communicating – have degraded its
complexity and beauty in ways that will long outlast us, leaving their
ineradicable taint. “We live in the shadow of an eclipse that will
endure perhaps as many as ten million years before sound, shape and
colour return in full to the land and the oceans.”
An uninitiated eye can only glide over Farrier’s summaries, adding them on to the mounting heap of glum
The climate and ecological crisis hurts us: and not only materially,
physically. It hurts in the imagination, in the stories we tell. An idea
of nature’s boundlessness, the recurring seasons, the ocean’s endless
renewal – vaster than we are and cruelly, consolingly indifferent to us –
has salved our private and public despairs, perhaps often almost
unconsciously, through plagues and floods and wars, tragic ending after
tragic ending. I remember the happiness I felt when we were shown black
and white slides, in school, of the equatorial forest – much too long
ago for any warning that it was threatened. My happiness didn’t make me
want to go there; I just needed it to be there. Nature holds together
our sense of being, organically, at the root; and it’s therefore in the
roots of our language. We didn’t know how fundamental our trust was in
“the treasure of nature’s germens” – that’s Macbeth invoking chaos –
until news came that the treasure after all couldn’t be counted on.
And
therefore the language and style in which we address the crisis are
all-important. Obviously there’s a first responsibility for the words to
produce effects: an urgent need to change minds, change governance,
change practices. And then alongside that there’s the other
responsibility that words have: to put up their supple resistance to
stupidity and ugliness and evil, so that our consciousness of what’s at
hand has form, and we can bear it. There’s a fascinating chapter in
Farrier’s book on two contrasting approaches to burying nuclear waste.
How can we warn the far future not to dig where we’ve put it, when we
know that the future won’t understand our language?
Olkiluoto nuclear power plant … the world’s first underground repository for highly radioactive nuclear waste, on the island of Eurajoki, western Finland. Photograph: Sam Kingsley/AFP/Getty Images
Near Carlsbad, New Mexico, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant has
devised a scheme that sounds like a computer game: “Five levels of
warning messages, rising in complexity, and a mix of monoliths, buried
clues and archives … accompanied by faces of disgust and repulsion,
modelled on Edvard Munch’s The Scream … A thirty foot earthen
berm, studded with magnets and radar reflectors to signal an anomaly,
will enclose the inner ring of granite markers.” In Finland meanwhile,
they’ve decided that “given the long lifespan” of their nuclear waste
repository on Olkiluoto island – it will probably be buried at some
point under another ice age – “it would be foolish to try to mark it”.
They will “bury the waste in specially designed copper canisters;
backfill the hole; and retreat, without leaving a single trace
aboveground”; it’s meant to be forgotten. This difference, too, feels
like a choice about language; it’s aesthetic as well as practical. Only
one of those options is in good taste.
Farrier’s book is full of fascinating things, yet doesn’t in its
totality work for me. Its central conceit, to begin with – that idea of
viewing, in some unimaginably distant future, the fossils left behind by
our Anthropocene – feels strained because such a future is indeed
impossible to imagine. The very terms of our love for our planet will no
doubt turn out in deep time to be so much stardust – or carbon, or
whatever; we can’t begin to know in what ways our depredations might
matter, on the timescale proposed here. No doubt Farrier wants the
future-fossil idea to work as a rhetorical device, reminding us of the
sheer size of our disaster now; but the harder he works to conjure the
geological scale of the problem, the more tempting it is for his
language to become vatic and sententious. “Fragments of artificial glass
will be glazed with cataracts, like glaucomatous eyes staring blindly
into the dark.”
Farrier’s
a literary critic and not a scientist, and the book is intended for a
lay readership; but there just isn’t room here to begin to lay out the
complexities of these diverse scientific disciplines. A reader might
finish his chapter on jellyfish convinced that they’re taking over the
sea (“the ocean’s one lonely god will be frilled and eyeless, drifting
placidly and implacably through its vast, empty dominion”), but ocean
scientist Juli Berwald, in her book Spineless,
resists any certainty even as to whether jellyfish numbers are on the
rise. Each “ecosystem in the ocean”, she writes, “has its own unique
characteristics, with distinctive vulnerabilities, threats, and
resiliences”. A reader can’t conceivably do justice to the chunks of
science in Footprints: the account of lateral gene-swap
transfer, for instance, or palaeoclimatologists’ varying theses of the
rhythms of ice ages. An uninitiated eye can only glide over Farrier’s
summaries, taking what’s there on trust and adding it on to the mounting
heap of glum. “The shadows are racing onwards … life is collapsing into
darkness and silence.”
It’s not that there isn’t plenty to be glum about: glum, anxious,
desperate even. We have to hope to turn this stinking, filthy tanker of
our civilisation around: do something globally, for the first time ever,
for our collective good. Not easy. And things won’t ever all be all
right again anyway, or all pristine, even at the best – they never were.
Nature itself isn’t pristine, that’s a fallacy that belongs with the
dream of original sin. If it’s the right moment for jeremiads, though,
let’s at least have scorching ones, and not the lyric soulfulness of an
admonitory headteacher. “Behold, mine anger and my fury shall be poured
out upon this place, upon man, and upon beast, and upon the trees of the
field, and upon the fruit of the ground: and it shall burn, and shall
not be quenched” (Jeremiah VII, 20). Links
UNSW leads new group of 40 universities to form a new Climate Alliance
to accelerate climate action, despite current focus on Covid-19
pandemic.
Vision
The Climate Alliance will provide a
central hub for universities to share the latest climate research with
the public and enable greater collaboration between leading research
teams, supporting global leaders, policy makers and industry in planning
for and responding to climate change.
A group of 40 leading international universities have formed a new
“Climate Alliance” to accelerate climate action, saying these efforts
remain crucial even during the global disruption caused by the Covid-19
pandemic.
The formation of the alliance has been led by UNSW
Sydney, with members agreeing that the urgent threat posed by climate
change meant that global cooperation and action on climate change could
not be delayed.
The International Universities Climate Alliance
(IUCA) will support collaboration on climate change research across 40
international universities, including Australia’s UNSW Sydney, Monash
University, the University of Melbourne and the University of Tasmania.
International
members of the alliance include the King’s College London, the National
University of Singapore, New York University and the TERI School of
Advanced Studies.
The IUCA will focus on ensuring governments, the
media and the general public have access to accurate information on
climate science, the expected impacts and measures to mitigate and adapt
to climate change.
“The climate alliance will elevate the voices
of exceptional researchers by providing a new, global platform for
universities to communicate climate research with authority
internationally,” UNSW President and Vice-Chancellor, Professor Ian
Jacobs, said.
“This new platform is needed now more than ever as
the world grapples with providing a coordinated approach to tackling
climate change.”
“This new Alliance will be at the forefront of the international conversation around addressing climate change.”
The
alliance will look to facilitate collaboration across a range of fields
relevant to climate change, including science, economics, engineering,
law, social science and planning.
The universities said that while
it was important that governments focused on the immediate response to
the Covid-19 pandemic, the threats posed by climate change remain, and
it made sense for climate scientists to continue their efforts.
In
fact, UNSW climate researcher professor Matthew England said that he
hopes the new alliance between 40 of the world’s leading climate change
research institutions would accelerate action on climate change.
“Worldwide
interest to act on climate change has been growing but the pace of that
change has been far too slow. The alliance aims to accelerate climate
action and ensure mitigation efforts are properly factored in with
adaptation actions,” England said.
Many Australian universities,
including UNSW Sydney, have ramped up efforts in response to Covid-19,
but in driving the formation of the new climate change alliance,
acknowledged that not all of its academics have a central role to play
in the immediate response.
“While universities like UNSW have set
up a special COVID-19 Rapid Response Research initiative, not all of our
researchers are able to lend expertise to the virus effort, and so
other work will continue within the constraints of the current
pandemic,” England said.
“As hard as it is to comprehend amid
virus information saturation, the climate change emissions pathway, with
every delay, becomes so much harder to overcome.”
England pointed
to the findings of a survey of community attitudes undertaken by UNSW
that showed two-thirds of people supported the formation of a global
alliance of climate change researchers.
A similar number of people
said that the Australian government still needs to introduce a
comprehensive policy on climate change.
“With
various scientific and government-related reports across many nations
demonstrating that climate change is causing more extreme events, it is
understandable that people feel frustration about a lack of government
policy and leadership in tackling this issue.”
The world is getting warmer, the weather is getting worse. Here's everything you need to know about what humans can do to stop wrecking the planet.
Illustrations by Radio
The world is
busted. For decades, scientists have carefully accumulated data that
confirms what we hoped wasn’t true: The greenhouse gas emissions that
have steadily spewed from cars and planes and factories, the
technologies that powered a massive period of economic growth, came at
an enormous cost to the planet’s health. Today, we know that, absent any
change in our behavior, the average global temperature will rise as
much as 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Global sea levels
will rise by up to 6 feet. Along with those shifts will come radical
changes in weather patterns around the globe, leaving coastal
communities and equatorial regions forever changed—and potentially
uninhabitable.
Strike that. We are
already seeing the effects of a dramatically changed climate, from
extended wildfire seasons to worsening storm surges. Now, true, any
individual weather anomaly is unlikely to be solely the result of
industrial emissions, and maybe your particular part of the world has
been spared so far. But that’s little solace when the historical trends
are so terrifyingly real. (Oh, and while it used to take mathematicians
months to calculate how the odds of specific extreme weather events were
affected by humans, they’ve knocked that data-crunching time down to
weeks.)
Thankfully, it seems most of the world’s nation-states are beyond quibbling over the if of climate change—they’re moving rapidly onto the what now?
The 2015 Paris climate agreement marked a turning point in the
conversation about planetary pragmatics. Renewable energy in the form of
wind and solar is actually becoming competitive with fossil fuels. And
the world’s biggest cities are driving sustainable policy choices in a
way that rival the contributions of some countries. Scientists and
policymakers are also beginning to explore a whole range of last-ditch
efforts—we’re talking some serious sci-fi stuff here—to deliberately,
directly manipulate the environment. To keep the climate livable, we may
need to prepare for a new era of geoengineering.
How this Global Climate Shift Got Started
If
we want to go all the way back to the beginning, we could take you to
the Industrial Revolution—the point after which climate scientists start
to see a global shift in temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide
levels. In the late 1700s, as coal-fired factories started churning out
steel and textiles, the United States and other developed nations began
pumping out its byproducts. Coal is a carbon-rich fuel, so when it
combusts with oxygen, it produces heat along with another byproduct:
carbon dioxide. Other carbon-based fuels, like natural gas, do the same
in different proportions.
When
those emissions entered the atmosphere, they acted like an insulating
blanket, preventing the sun’s heat from escaping into space. Over the
course of history, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have varied—a lot.
Models of ancient climate activity, hundreds of millions of years back,
put carbon dioxide levels as high as several thousand parts per million.
In the past half-million years or so, they’ve fluctuated between about
180 and 300 parts per million. But they haven't fluctuated this fast.
Today, atmospheric CO~2~ is at 407 ppm—roughly one and a half times as
high as it was just two centuries ago. And we know for certain that
extra greenhouse gas is from humans; analysis of the carbon isotopes in
the atmosphere show that the majority of the extra CO~2~ comes from
fossil fuels.
Radiation from the sun hits the Earth’s atmosphere. Some of it travels down to warm the Earth's surface (A), while some of it bounces right back into space (B). Some of the energy, though, is absorbed by molecules of greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, water, methane, and nitrous oxide—that prevent it from escaping (C). Over time, the trapped energy contributes to global warming.
The result: extreme weather. There’s global warming, of course; the
Earth’s average temperature has increased 1.1 degrees Celsius since the
late 19th century. But it goes further. As oceans absorb heat and polar
ice sheets melt, hurricane seasons become more severe as warm water from
the oceans kicks warm, moist air into the atmosphere. Sea levels
rise—about 8 inches in the past century. Critically, the rate of these
changes is increasing.
One of the more visible consequences of climate change is playing out in California. In recent years, wildfires have grown measurably more intense
thanks to climate change. They burn hotter and faster, leading to
catastrophes like the Camp Fire north of San Francisco, which virtually obliterated
the 27,000-person town of Paradise, becoming the deadliest and most
destructive wildfire in state history. It's a matter of terrible timing:
Usually California gets at least a little bit of rain in the fall that
rehydrates vegetation, but no longer. This dryness coincides with
seasonal winds that whip in from the east, further drying out vegetation and providing a turbo boost for fires.
Then
in late 2019, Australia suffered an unprecedentedly brutal fire season,
giving the world perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of the climate
crisis to date. In an average year, 1 percent of Australia’s famous
eucalyptus forests might burn. But in the 2019–2020 fire season, 21 percent went up in flames, obliterating whole ecosystems
and likely dooming many species into extinction. The conflagrations
were so bad, models predicted it would be 80 years before something like
that happened.
Meanwhile, at the Earth’s poles, landscapes are
transforming quickly and dramatically. The Arctic and Antarctica are
warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, which is of course
leading to the rapid melting of glaciers, which in turn raises sea
levels. But the land itself is also in literal upheaval. As frozen soils
known as permafrost rapidly thaw, [massive
holes](https://www.wired.com/story/abrupt-permafrost-thaw/) are opening
up in the Arctic. This releases CO2 and the even more potent
greenhouse gas, methane, kicking off a terrible feedback loop: More
emissions from the Arctic landscape means more warming, and more
thawing, and more emissions.
As glaciers continue to pour
meltwater into the ocean, sea levels are quickly climbing. And it’s not
just the volume of extra water in the oceans that people have to worry
about: As water warms, it expands, pushing sea levels even higher. Miami
is already seeing more severe flooding, and on the other side of the world in Indonesia, Jakarta is both drowning in rising seas and sinking because the city has pumped up too much groundwater, leaving the land to collapse like an empty water bottle.
By the Numbers
1.9 million
The
number of homes in the US that could end up underwater if sea levels
rise 6 feet by 2100, as models suggest. The Miami area would be
particularly devastated: Nearly 33,000 homes would end up underwater, at
a total loss of $16 billion.
13.2 percent
The
decline in arctic sea ice per decade since 1980. Melting sea ice and
land ice sheets causes a warming spiral: On account of being white, ice
bounces light back into space, while exposed, darker land absorbs more
of the sun’s energy.
2,625 feet
The
decrease in thickness of Alaska’s Muir Glacier between 1941 and 2004.
During that same period, the front of the glacier retreated 7 miles.
All of this has led 97 percent of climate scientists to agree that
warming trends are very likely the result of human activity. And in
1988, that bulk of research led to the founding of the United Nations’
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has now issued five
assessment reports documenting all the available scientific, technical,
and economic information on climate change. The fourth report, in 2007,
was the first to clearly state that the climate was unequivocally
warming—and that human-created greenhouse gases were very likely to
blame.
Just because the panel came to a consensus doesn’t mean
everyone else did, though. In 2009, climate scientists had their own
WikiLeaks scandal, when climate deniers released a trove of emails from
scientists, including the one behind the famous 1999 “hockey stick”
graph showing a sharp upturn in global temperature after the Industrial
Revolution—one that was clearly sharper than the many global warmings
and coolings the Earth has seen. Excerpts taken out of context from
those emails showed that researcher, Michael Mann, purportedly
conspiring to statistically manipulate his data. Placed back in context,
they clearly didn’t.
Political controversy has continued to call into question scientists’
consensus on data supporting the concept of human-caused climate
change, motivated by the financial incentives of the fossil fuel
industry. But in 2015, the world’s leaders appeared to transcend those
squabbles. On December 12, after two weeks of deliberations at the 21st
United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Le Bourget, France, 195
countries agreed on the language in what’s known as the Paris agreement.
The goal is to keep average global temperature increase to below 2
degrees Celsius above pre-Industrial levels, and as close to 1.5 degrees
as possible. It does so by having each country submit a commitment to
reduce emissions and collectively bear the economic burden of a shift
from fossil fuels—while acknowledging that developing nations would be
denied a certain amount of growth if they had to give up cheap energy.
On
November 4, 2016, the Paris agreement officially entered into force,
just four days before Donald Trump would be elected president of the
United States on a campaign promise to pull out of the agreement. And on
June 1, 2017, Trump made good on that promise, saying that “the United
States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord, but begin
negotiations to reenter either the Paris accord or a really entirely new
transaction on terms that are fair to the United States, its
businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers.” Technically, the
United States remains in the agreement until 2020, which is the earliest
Trump can officially withdraw.
What's Next for Climate Change
The
good news is, the global community is pretty united on the risks of
climate change. The science is getting good enough to link specific
extreme events—anomalous hurricanes, extreme flooding events—directly to
human-caused climate change, and that’s making it easier to build a
case for dramatic action to stem the damage. But what should those
actions be?
The
most obvious solution to climate change woes is a dramatic shift away
from fossil fuels and toward renewable energies: solar, wind,
geothermal, and (deep breath) nuclear. And we’re making solid progress,
growing our renewable electricity generation about 2.8 percent every
year worldwide.
We also must fix our fundamentally broken relationship with the land itself. In the summer of 2019, the IPCC released a report warning that by abusing land, we’re greatly exacerbating climate change. Destroying forests removes an important carbon sink—CO2
goes in and oxygen comes out. Not helping matters are the supercharged
wildfires like California’s spewing all that captured carbon into the
atmosphere. Skyrocketing demand for meat worldwide means more cows
burping more methane: The global food system as a whole is responsible
for a stunning 37 percent of emissions. Making that system more efficient would put a huge dent in global greenhouse gas emissions.
Still,
there’s an increasing understanding that even if every country that
originally signed up for the Paris agreement meets every single one of
their stated goals, the Earth is still set to experience some dramatic
changes. In certain ways, we've already passed tipping points:
Even if we stopped emitting today, we'd still see dramatic effects. The
greenhouse gases are already in the atmosphere, and we're locked into a
certain amount of warming. And that means we need to start preparing
for a different kind of climate future—primarily, in the way we build.
The floods will come, forcing us to make new rules governing building.
An ever-lengthening wildfire season will discourage building along the
wildland-urban interface. And people will stream in from regions made
uninhabitable by drought or heat or flooding, forcing other countries to
adapt their immigration policies to a new class of refugees.
All
of those changes will cost money. That was one of the primary motivators
for the Paris agreement: Switching away from cheap fossil fuels means
that businesses and companies are going to need to take a financial hit
to ensure a profitable, livable future. Which is why many of the
solutions to climate change have nothing to do with climate science, per
se: They have to do with economics.
By the Numbers
407.6 parts per million
The concentration of CO2 in the lowest layer of our planet’s atmosphere. Compare that to 380 ppm just a decade ago.
75 percent
The
portion of humanity that could face deadly heat waves by 2100 if major
cuts to CO~2~ emissions are not made. By the middle of this century, the
American South could see a tripling of days per year that hit 95
degrees.
2 degrees Celsius
The
goal for maximum global temperature rise from pre-Industrial levels, as
outlined in the Paris agreement. Unfortunately, a study published last
summer determined that the chance of hitting that goal by 2100 is a mere
5 percent. The reality is, the rise could be as much as 4.9 degrees
Celsius.
1.5 degrees Fahrenheit
The
rise in sea surface temperature between 1901 and 2015. Warming seas are
a particular problem for coral, which release the photosynthetic algae
they use to extract energy from sunlight when they’re stressed and
bleach to death.
One particularly powerful method is a carbon tax. Economists roundly agree that if you want to cut emissions, you better charge emitters like utility companies a fee for all that CO2
they release. Yes, those utilities would pass those costs on to
customers, but the fee the government charges would come back to
households as a “carbon dividend.” As the fee increases year over year,
polluters will pay more and more, and switch to renewable sources of
energy to emit less and less. Countries like Canada and Sweden have
already shown this kind of carbon tax to dramatically cut emissions.
Socially
conscious investors, for their part, are making a difference by holding
businesses to account for their impacts on the climate—and the ways in
which climate change will impact their business. Last year, a collective
of small-scale pension systems forced Occidental Petroleum, one of the
country’s largest oil companies, to disclose climate risk in its
shareholder prospectus; ExxonMobil caved to pressure in December 2017.
Places with large endowments, like universities, are facing political
pressure to divest from the fossil fuel industry.
These are all
indirect ways of holding the fossil fuel industry accountable for the
financial toll it takes on the Earth with every gigaton of greenhouse
gases emitted. But there are more direct ways they can pay up, too.
After reporting by Inside-Climate News revealed in 2015 that
ExxonMobil has long known about the risks of climate change, the company
is being investigated by attorneys general in multiple states to
determine if it violated consumer or investor protection statutes. The
city of San Francisco is suing the five largest publicly-held producers
of fossil fuels to get them to pay for infrastructure to protect against
rising sea levels. New York City followed with a similar suit.
Let’s
say those suits succeed, and at-risk cities get some help making the
massive infrastructure updates necessary to protect their coastline
investments. After doing everything we can to reduce further carbon
emissions and protect life and property from the dangers of a changing
climate, it still won’t be enough to keep global temperatures from
rising beyond that 2-degree-Celsius tipping point. So that’s when
humanity goes into proactive mode, potentially unleashing a
controversial set of experimental technologies into the atmosphere. This
is geoengineering: Removing carbon dioxide and reducing heat through,
let’s say, *experimental* means. Like salt-spraying ships, and
supersized space mirrors.
One of the great hopes of the IPCC’s latest
report is that we can pull carbon dioxide directly out of the
atmosphere and store it underground through a process called bioenergy
with carbon capture and storage. But that technology doesn’t exist yet.
Another strategy attempts to reduce heat by injecting sulfate particles
into the atmosphere, reflecting solar radiation back into space—but that
could trigger too much global cooling. Put mildly, most of the
propositions for geoengineering are underdeveloped. The drive to
complete those ideas will depend on the success of global cutbacks in
the decades to come.
Learn More
The Dirty Secret of the World’s Plan to Avert Climate Disaster When
the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued
its fifth assessment report in 2014, it laid out 116 scenarios for
keeping average global temperature rise under 2 degrees Celsius. The
tricky thing is, 101 of them rely on a carbon dioxide-sucking technology
that doesn’t exist yet.
Renewables Aren’t Enough. Clean Coal Is the Future The
world can’t wean itself off of coal in an instant—so before
transitioning to fully renewable fuels, capturing and storing the carbon
emitted from coal plants will be critical to meeting the Paris
agreement goals. In this 2014 feature, Charles C. Mann visits GreenGen, a
billion-dollar Chinese facility that’s one of the most consequential
efforts to realize that technology, extracting CO2 from a coal-fired power plant to store it underground.
Nations Be Damned, the World's Cities Can Take a Big Bite Out of Emissions At
the C40 Mayors Summit, leaders from around the world meet to discuss
how their cities (more than 40, now) can fight climate change. If every
city with a population over 100,000 stepped up, they could account for
40 percent of the reductions required to hit the Paris climate goals.
The US Flirts With Geoengineering to Stymie Climate Change Geoengineering
solutions to climate change—doing stuff like spraying sulfate particles
into the atmosphere to keep temperature down—could have catastrophic
side effects. Which is why we need more research before considering
them. One congressman introduced a bill that would set the National
Academies of Science to the task.
The World Needs Drastic Action to Meet Paris Climate Goals WIRED
science reporter Nick Stockton traveled to Paris at the end of 2015 to
see the negotiations that led to the signing of the global climate
agreement. He came away invigorated but daunted by the challenge of
converting all the industries represented—from agriculture to
transportation to concrete—away from fossil fuels. Here’s what needs to
be done.
Climate Change Causes Extreme Weather—But Not All of It Scientists know that accumulated CO2
means higher temperatures, longer dry spells, and bigger storms. But
ask them whether global warming caused a Midwest heatwave, the
California drought, or a New York hurricane, and they’ll explain ad
nauseam how hard it is to untangle whether any single weather event is
due to natural variation or climate change. Hard, but not impossible.
Take a Good Look, America. This Is What the Reckoning Looks Like What's
clearer, though, is the effect of global warming on California
wildfires. In just the last year, the state has been ravaged by seven of
the 20 most destructive fires in state history. The problem is a
combination of high winds, human developments in the wrong places, and a
warming planet. Now it's a question of how California can adapt.
▶The coronavirus pandemic may lead to a deeper understanding of the ties that bind us on a global scale.
▶Well-resourced healthcare systems are essential to protect us from health security threats, including climate change.
▶The support to resuscitate the economy after the pandemic should promote health, equity, and environmental protection.
The health threat posed by coronavirus is, on average, greater for people in cities. Image: REUTERS/Evgenia Novozhenina
Arthur Wyns is a climate change advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO), a tropical biologist and science journalist. He writes on climate change, the environment and migration. Arthur Wyns is the program manager of Climate Tracker, an organisation supporting environmental journalists worldwide.
We live in an age in which intersecting crises are being lifted
to a global scale, with unseen levels of inequality, environmental
degradation and climate destabilization, as well as new surges in
populism, conflict, economic uncertainty, and mounting public health
threats. All are crises that are slowly tipping the balance, questioning
our business-as-usual economic model of the past decades, and requiring
us to rethink our next steps.
There are, to a certain degree, parallels that can be drawn between the current COVID-19 pandemic
and some of the other contemporary crises our world is facing. All
require a global-to-local response and long-term thinking; all need to
be guided by science and need to protect the most vulnerable among us;
and all require the political will to make fundamental changes when
faced with existential risks.
In this sense, the 2020 coronavirus pandemic may lead to a deeper
understanding of the ties that bind us all on a global scale and could
help us get to grips with the largest public health threat of the century, the climate crisis.
At the World Health Organization (WHO), where I am part of the climate change team,
we are seeing the devastating consequences of under-prepared health
systems when they are faced with these increasingly regular shocks. Some
of these health impacts have a clear climate change signature, such as
the increasing frequency and strength of extreme weather events or the expanding range and spread of vector-borne diseases like malaria or dengue. For others, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the connection with climate change is less clear cut.
Image: NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information
There is one thing, however, that almost all health shocks have
in common: they hit the poorest and the most vulnerable the hardest.
They act as poverty multipliers, forcing families into extreme poverty because they have to pay for health care. At least half of the world’s population
does not enjoy full coverage for the most basic health services. When
health disasters hit – and in a business-as-usual scenario they will do so increasingly – global inequality is sustained and reinforced, and paid for with the lives of the poor and marginalized.
A first lesson we are drawing from the COVID-19 pandemic and how
it relates to climate change is that well-resourced, equitable health
systems with a strong and supported health workforce are essential to
protect us from health security threats, including climate change. The
austerity measures that have strained many national health systems over
the past decade will have to be reversed if economies and societies are
to be resilient and prosperous in an age of change.
For example, the people of Haiti would have been much more adept
in coping with and recovering from the lasting effects of 2016’s
Hurricane Matthew – which was exacerbated by climate change
– if they had had a resilient and well-resourced health system in place
to support them. Similarly, many Iranian lives could have been saved at
the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak in the country, if its beleaguered healthcare system had been better prepared for what was to come.
Secondly, the ongoing pandemic illustrates how inequality is a
major barrier in ensuring the health and wellbeing of people, and how
social and economic inequality materializes in unequal access to
healthcare systems. For example, the health threat of the novel
coronavirus is, on average, greater for cities and people exposed to higher levels of pollution,
which are most often people living in poorer areas. The same is true
for the health impacts of climate change, with one of its major causes,
the burning of fossil fuels, also adding pollution to the air and disproportionately impacting the health of those in poverty.
The WHO estimates that by reducing the environmental and social
risk factors people are exposed to, nearly a quarter of the global
health burden (measured as loss from sickness, death and financial
costs) could be prevented.
Creating healthy environments for healthier populations and promoting
Universal Health Coverage (UHC) are two of the most effective ways in
which we can reduce the long-term health impacts from – and increase our
resilience and adaptive capacity to – both the coronavirus pandemic and
climate change.
Third, the global health crisis we find ourselves in has forced
us to dramatically change our behaviour in order to protect ourselves
and those around us, to a degree most of us have never experienced
before. This temporary shift of gears could lead to a long-term shift in
old behaviours and assumptions, which could lead to a public drive for
collective action and effective risk management. Even though climate
change presents a slower, more long-term health threat, an equally
dramatic and sustained shift in behaviour will be needed to prevent
irreversible damage.
Lastly, crises like these offer an opportunity for a regained
sense of shared humanity, in which people realize what matters most: the
health and safety of their loved ones, and by extension the health and
safety of their community, country and fellow global citizens. Both the
climate crisis and unfolding pandemic threaten this one thing we all
care about.
When we eventually overcome the COVID-19 pandemic, we can
hopefully hold on to that sense of shared humanity in order to rebuild
our social and economic systems to make them better, more resilient, and
compassionate. The financial and social support packages to maintain
and eventually resuscitate the global economy post-pandemic should
therefore promote health, equity, and environmental protection.
Ultimately, public health is a political choice. A choice we are
now confronted with, and one we will have to make over and over again as
we transition to a more resilient, zero-carbon, just and healthier
future.
Bob Carr, a former NSW premier and Australian foreign affairs minister, is a professor of business and climate at UTS.
What did our battered old planet do to bring this run of wretchedly bad
luck?
Just before the 2008 Wall Street disaster, Washington was about to
force emitters to pay for the privilege of dumping carbon waste in the
upper atmosphere.
Congress approved a cap and trade scheme so its
economy could trade its way to a low carbon future. In a similar spirit
the Rudd government was legislating its own carbon trading model.
The Arctic is suffering dramatic loss of sea ice. A polar bear climbs out of the water in the Franklin Strait in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Credit: AP
Then the financial crisis knocked everyone sideways. The carbon lobby in both countries was able to talk job losses and higher taxes. The propaganda was a pushover. Legislation died in the US and Australian senates. And the world kept warming.
Last
month the temperature on the Antarctic peninsular hit 65 degrees
Fahrenheit, beating all previous records. For the globe, 2019 was the
second hottest year on record, and the hottest without the contribution
of a big El Nino.
The coming decade may be our last chance to
contain the chaos driven by humankind’s craziest experiment: the idea
that carbon can be stored in the thin filigree of air around the planet.
The Paris Agreement provides a road map and the falling price of
renewables a market impulse.
But
again the economic cycle intrudes with a recession driven by a pandemic
that Bill Gates had prophesied but no nations had prepared for (by
stockpiling testing kits and ventilators, for example).
In the middle of the coronavirus crisis, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age,
to their credit, still find space to record the conclusion of leading
reef scientist, Terry Hughes, that there is a third major bleaching of
the Great Barrier Reef now under way. This follows the bleachings of
2016 and 2017. This is every bit a climate event as were the mega fires
over Christmas.
Yet
the irrevocable loss of healthy coral may not galvanise the way fires
did. For many the reef is a memory of a holiday, a spray of subaqueous
radiance they may never have expected to see again anyway. Its loss is
not going to be a personal trauma like months of smoke filled air, a
house abandoned to flames, a night waiting evacuation on a beach with
the sound of crashing trees.
Meanwhile, the pandemic emergency may
kill off the Glasgow conference on climate planned for November. The UN
event is aimed at averting runaway climate change by keeping the
temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. It’s being hosted by a British
government with strong climate credentials that wants to ban
petrol-powered vehicles by 2035 and brooks no argument about net-zero
emissions in 2050 – which it has entrenched in legislation.
But
who will bring together 40,000 international delegates if the virus is
lurking and we’re still waiting for the save-all vaccine? If the world’s
poorest countries are in a struggle for economic survival, none may
have the resources to save the last rainforest cover on the planet.
A
pandemic-caused economic crash may be considered a Black Swan. Nassim
Nicholas Taleb coined the expression for his 2007 book about unforeseen
events of huge consequence. History, he reminds us, is not always
incremental. It can take the form of a fracture in events. On climate
one might imagine, for example, a savage acceleration in the retreat of
Arctic ice. Every summer hits us with alarming evidence of its growing
fragility. What if the process gets steroids?
Likewise,
if the breaking up of permafrost in the Arctic circle assumes an extra
ferocity. That would release plumes of methane, 30 times more lethal at
trapping heat than carbon, but on a scale to blow apart every
calibration of how fast climate is shifting.
For Australia, Black
Swan climate events could include a cyclone beyond what we have seen
before, hitting the Queensland coast. Experts say there is still enough
unburnt bush to give us a fire season as bad as the last, even next
season – if we suffer the same malevolent mix of heat, low humidity and
strong wind.
After
all, it was only this month we were surprised by something I don’t
recall any expert predicting: a quick fall into recession or worse,
produced by a new version of the flu. A rupture in the narrative, a
Black Swan.
Beneath news of virus and slump there simmers an even
bigger story. The planet keeps warming. And there’s no guarantee the
rate may not pick up alarmingly.
Not long ago,
in more innocent times, I was driving with my three sons back from
trying to ski on a mountain that doesn't really have snow anymore, and
we were talking about climate change.
This was before the pandemic, and before our conversations shifted to
discussions of what viruses are and why soap, miraculously, can kill
them.
The kids are 11, 9, and 6, and they're
worried about the present and upset about the future, as they should be.
They know that their adult years will be spent in a world of raging
fires, flash floods, and mass extinction. They love Greta and resent their elders. The future feels different and vaster when the actuarial tables give you 80 years to go, not 40.
We
talked about turning our thermostats down, eating less meat, and
putting the cable box on a smart plug. I promised to install solar
panels. I tried futilely to explain what capitalism is and why it was
still a reasonable way to organize human affairs, despite CO2
levels now reaching 415 ppm. I told them there was still time. They
found my explications unpersuasive and mostly shared each other's anger
(except when the older boys reported that some environmentalists argue
against having three children; that didn't go over well with their
little brother). Gradually, though, their rage turned to pragmatism.
That's when my oldest son asked: “If there's one thing that I could
invent that would help, what would it be?”
It's an awesome question—maybe a
quintessentially 11-year-old one. From our first moments of
consciousness up through childhood, the things we think we might be able
to do with our lives broaden and broaden. And then, at some point
around adolescence, they start to narrow. Our imaginations shrink, our
obligations grow, we charge ahead on certain roads and avoid the ones
less traveled. Eleven is wonderful. You're aware of the world and its
limitations, but if you're lucky your imagination hasn't been crimped
yet. Really, maybe, you can do anything.
The question hung for a
second, and then I just took my best guess. “Maybe build a better
battery?” A breakthrough in energy storage could go a long way toward
improving the prospects for electric cars, the wind industry, and the
entire renewable economy, I said. Maybe there's a way to store much more
electricity in a smaller space, without requiring cobalt from the
exploitative deep mines of the Congo.
In retrospect, it's not a
terrible answer. But I wasn't sure if it was the best one. I thought a
lot about the question after we arrived back home. And then, at a
meeting here at WIRED, I floated it by my colleagues. In due course,
either because it's a great question or because parents overestimate
their children—and journalists overestimate their bosses—it became the
inspiration for this entire issue.
Yes, we did end up taking some
liberties with the question, stretching it in some ways and constraining
it in others. We primarily focused on technology that exists today, so
there are probably fewer wizarding-world-type projects than my children
would like. And we narrowed the scope of our assignments to what we
consider the five most crucial areas: how we eat, how we move around,
how we keep the lights on, how we capture carbon, and how we can set up
institutions that can take the risks needed to solve this problem.
Children who are now in booster seats, all around the world, are going
to be inventing solutions to the crisis, and they'll need support,
investment, and, yes, well-designed capitalism to get them off the
ground.
Even we optimists at WIRED know this is a very, very bad
situation—likely the most complex problem humans have ever faced. We
know that a lot of what has been lost is never coming back, and to
grieve is human. But WIRED's purview is the future, and really the only
way to think creatively about the future is with something like
optimism. Not the blind kind, but the informed kind. We can be hopeful
without being obtuse. It’s an attitude that can help, too, as we think
about trying to find treatments and vaccines to combat the coronavirus and reimagine the world when we, and it, emerge from the current state of lockdown.
We
want our readers to feel empowered when they finish reading, because
the solutions are gathering steam all around us. We can lay
carbon-sucking concrete in cities that have largely exiled cars. We can
reengineer rice paddies and then store our leftover rice in vastly more
efficient refrigerators. We can even, yes, make better batteries. We are
going to solve the coronavirus crisis through brilliant science and
research, and through social cohesion as well. And we can solve the
climate crisis too.
*Nicholas Thompson is the editor in chief of Wired
